Just a Job
by KrisEleven
Summary: Some jobs even the scum of New York wouldn't touch. And that's when Goodkat gets called in. It was just a job- so why did the boy live?
1. Chapter 1

A/N Rated for bad language and references to violence.

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I stood at the end of the parking lot, thinking about lunch. I was on the job and I never ate on the job, but this little business was almost over and done with. The Boss and the Rabbi had paid well for this job- even though they were new to the business and thought they had the balls to bargain with me over the price.

I would have done it for half of what they settled on, the dumbasses.

At first he was just a fucked up job of a kind that I'd done before. Done too many times to count. I watched the father walk away, leaving the boy in the car. It was a matter of moments for me to drive away with the kid sitting in the back, my gun on the seat beside me. He didn't say a word. We got to where I needed to be and, looking at the back of his head, my gun pointed at him, I was more concerned about the drive through New York in the afternoon than the fact that his life would end or that I was ending it. But then he turned and something about that face as he stared up at me- stared at _me_, past my gun- stopped my trigger finger. He never blinked and I couldn't do it.

The first time in years that I'd botched a job.

The first time _ever_ that I'd botched one because I couldn't bear to kill the target.

He sat in the back of my car, holding his mitt and his watch as if they would bring his life back to what it had been before. I'm sure it had been normal- a mother and father. The Boss had told me I was to take care of the last of the family, that the parents were taken care of.

"I want to go home." They were his first words to me.

"Neither of us is going home for a long time, kid." New York wasn't my home as long as those two gangsters wanted the kid dead. I flicked on the radio, trying to distract myself from what I had just done. What would I do with a kid?

The year that followed was the hardest. He talked too much when I didn't say a word, he walked too loud when I could ghost through a room, he was too messy when nothing of mine was ever out of place, he laughed too loud when my face hadn't known a smile in God knows how long.

I think I didn't do well by him. I know he saw things and heard things that he shouldn't have seen or heard so young. I know he met people he never should have met. Hell, _I_ was one of those people. But he was living with a hired gun, sleeping on the floor of shity motel rooms and eating ravioli out of the tin in the back of the car. He was dead to the world, but he was life in my world. Stupid little kid.

After the first year he learned to watch and move and think like a killer. But he never became me- he never became the monster that I had become. He was a smart-ass with a shy smile. Could have had a girl in every town, but I never knew if he did after I warned him about it. We kept moving. I taught him to handle a gun, a knife and to fight dirty. I taught him how to track someone, how to plan a murder and get away with it clean. My life became a running commentary- a one-sided narrative that he soaked up. He was smart. Could have been a doctor, even, if his father hadn't made that fucking bet that started it all.

If the Boss and the Rabbi hadn't stolen Henry's world away.

I hadn't been able to bring back his folks and I couldn't have been them. I never tried and I never wanted to be. I was Goodkat, not some fucking surrogate parent. As a kid he would ramble on about baseball for hours. As he grew older it was girls or movies. And never once would mention of his parents leave his lips. He had seen that they were dead on the news- in a diner the day after we left New York. I expected a scene, but he watched the news program to its end and ate his pancakes. He started talking to me after that breakfast, when he hadn't said a word after the first sentence in the car.

I knew something was going to happen that day, the twentieth anniversary of _that_ day. He looked across the room at me, that fucking look that he gave me that first day- the look that could stop _my_ trigger finger. He looked at me and told me he was going to kill everyone involved in the deaths of his parents. Everyone. Henry was going to destroy the people that had destroyed his life.

Not Henry. Slevin. Slevin Kelevra. I smiled at the name.

Apparently he had been learning more from me than I had thought, what with his fucking attitude. But it was more than an assassination. It was a revenge plot with twenty years and all the hatred that came with those decades stored behind it. He looked at me, unblinking, and I knew he would try it by himself if I didn't go with him. I had never told him what I knew and he had never asked. I wasn't the talking type- and he more than made up for my silences with the way his mouth ran on. But he could read my silences better than anyone I had ever met, so I didn't have to find the words. I told him what had happened to his parents. He turned that watch on his wrist through the entire story.

"Will you help me?" He asked at the end, looking down at the watch's face.

I was the one people called to do the jobs that no one else would do. And no one else would go against both the Rabbi and the Boss, even though they were enemies now.

At first he was just a job I fucked up. Then he became my best job, my most important job, the only job I had ever cared about.

We polished the plan. It was fucking beautiful- a Kansas City Shuffle.

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	2. Chapter 2

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I expected him to back out when I told him it would be him up on that roof, looking at another kid through a sniper's scope. He considered walking away from the whole plan, I know, but that would mean walking away from his parents' deaths. That was something he had never been able to do, no matter how hard he tried, and so he got on the roof and waited. And when the Boss's kid walked out the door he took the shot and walked back to the hotel room, a new man. A harder man- closer to the man I was in that moment than he had ever been.

He whined when I broke his nose, though, like the kid I knew.

I did my part. I convinced both the Boss and the Rabbi to hire me. They did it because of their hate for each other, and because of the fear and love they knew as fathers. The Boss called me, as I knew he would. He had tried to do it once before, after the Rabbi first turned on him and tried to take out his family. I had still been avoiding New York, though. The kid hadn't gotten past grief into rage, wasn't ready to kill everyone involved. Not then. The Rabbi was harder to convince, of course. But the threat to his son was enough, as I knew it would be. The entire plan revolved around the fact that they were fathers who loved their sons, and I thought it was ironic, in the sick sort of way I encountered a lot in my kind of work.

I only saw Henry- Slevin- once while they were dealing with the Boss and the Rabbi. He was playing chess and his nose was worse than I had left it. His smart mouth, no doubt. Until that moment I had been running backup plans, in case I needed to pull him out and take down the Boss or Rabbi fast. In his eyes, in that brief glance, I saw his determination. He wouldn't let this plan go tits-up because he needed this… closure. This revenge.

It went without a hitch- except for the girl. She thought she was very Nancy Drew, but no girl detective could survive in my world. The boy agreed that we had to kill his new neighbour.

I waited in our hotel room. He had one more kill- the cop that had shot his mother in their kitchen for a clean slate with his bookie. Her life for his, except he had fucked up his life all on his own and she had done nothing to deserve what came to her. At first I thought nothing of the fact that he was late, but after an hour I began to remember the signs. He had been holding two coffee cups in the hallway. He hadn't hesitated when I'd told him the girl had to die- but he wouldn't, would he? I had taught him better than that. I thought I had taught him better than to fall in love-on the fucking job, no less- but he had always had too big of a heart. Even after spending twenty years with a monster he hadn't lost that.

But I had shot his girl in the chest. He wouldn't be coming back.

I almost left it at that. I was fine without him- had spent most of my life without him, and hardly paid much attention to him when he _was_ around- but _that_ memory stopped me again. So I looked for him. The computer screen lit up the hotel room as I tracked his credit card, the light glinting off my teeth when I saw how many tickets he'd bought.

"I didn't think you'd understand." Slevin- Henry- said. The girl looked at me from behind Henry. He had placed himself between us the moment he knew I was there- I wasn't insulted. He knew me too well, is all.

"I understood."

I understood that some people got to you- got under your skin and stayed there. It could happen in a moment- a conversation, a stare- and that moment changed everything you thought you knew about yourself. Because, suddenly, the thought of not having that person becomes too much to bear.

"How'd you find out about us?" He asked this completely serious, and I repress the urge to smack him upside the head. It would have drawn attention to us and that was one thing I never did. There was a reason there was no face to go with the legend of Goodkat.

"I'm a world-class assassin, fuck-head. How do you think I found out?" I almost turned and walked away, then, but I had come to say goodbye. Holding on to the watch would only give me another excuse to butt into his –no, _their_- life. It would be hard enough without a ready-made excuse. "I thought you might want this." He took the watch reverently. I turned and walked from the airport, disappearing into the crowd.

I left the last piece of my soul in the airport with the love of his life.

I didn't regret a thing.

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End file.
